CANNES – Movies directed by Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos will compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organisers announced in a news conference on April 11.
New films by Jacques Audiard, Paul Schrader and Andrea Arnold will also appear in competition at this year’s event, the festival’s 77th edition, which opens on May 14 and runs through May 25.
The most eagerly anticipated film in the line-up is likely to be Coppola’s Megalopolis – the American director’s first movie in more than 10 years.
During the news conference on April 11, Cannes’ artistic director Thierry Fremaux revealed little about that movie’s plot, but Coppola, director of The Godfather trilogy (1972 to 1990) and Apocalypse Now (1979), has been talking about his desire to make it for decades.
In 2001, Coppola told The New York Times that Megalopolis was “about the future” and “a guy who wants to build a utopian society in the middle of Manhattan”.
Coppola, 85, has already won the Palme d’Or twice – in 1974 for The Conversation and in 1979 for Apocalypse Now (a prize that was shared with German director Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum).
Greek director Lanthimos will present Kinds Of Kindness, starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. They also worked together on Lanthimos’ most recent release, Poor Things, which won Stone the Best Actress Oscar in March.
Cronenberg, a Canadian horror movie director, will premiere The Shrouds, about a widower who builds a machine to connect with the dead.
Among the other movies competing for the Palme d’Or are Audiard’s Emilia Perez, a musical crime comedy set in the world of Mexican drug cartels and starring Selena Gomez; Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, about former United States president Donald Trump’s early business career; and Arnold’s Bird, about a 12-year-old girl living in poverty in England.
Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will show Limonov: The Ballad, about a Russian poet living in New York, and Italian director Paolo Sorrentino will be represented with Parthenope, which Mr Fremaux said was about a beautiful woman who hopes to be known for something other than her looks.
Schrader, best known as the screenwriter behind Taxi Driver (1976), will present Oh, Canada, starring Uma Thurman and Richard Gere. Mr Fremaux said the movie was a comedy about older people looking back on their lives and mistakes.
Coralie Fargeat, best known as the director of Revenge (2017), will present a body horror – a gruesome horror movie subgenre – called The Substance, starring Demi Moore.
Before the news conference on April 11, some movie critics had said they expected the line-up in 2024 to lack big movies from US studios because of the ongoing effects of the Hollywood strikes in 2023.
Mr Fremaux said in the news conference that the 2024 selection “was not easy” because of the strikes, but that American cinema would “absolutely be present” at this year’s festival. Three of the 19 movies in competition are by American directors.
The details of a few high-profile movies appearing out of competition were already known long before the news conference on April 11. Those include George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the latest instalment in the action series; and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, set on the Western frontier during the US Civil War.
All the entries will be scrutinised by a jury led by Greta Gerwig, the director and screenwriter behind Barbie (2023), and it will announce the Palme d’Or winner at a ceremony on May 25.
At the festival’s closing ceremony, George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars (1977 to 2019) and Indiana Jones (1981 to 2023) series, will also receive an Honorary Palme d’Or for his contribution to cinema. NYTIMES
